Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 10:13:00 -0600
From: preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece)
Has the group thought about including more general textual
transformations in CSS? Something like
P.abstract {text-edit: "<B>Abstract</B> #value"}
This is a fundamentally bad idea, one which has surfaced from time
to time and quickly dismissed (at least in the form you have presented).
Namely, HTML and style sheets are designed to be dependent of each
other; one should be able to parse an HTML document independently of
its style sheet and vice versa. If the style sheet were permitted
to generate arbitrary content including markup, then this separation
would no longer be possible.
As long as one limits text generation (or transformations) to the
insertion (or stylistic transformation) of #PCDATA, then everything
is fine. However, don't propose inserting markup through the style
language. If you want to insert markup, then SGML entities are the
right tool to use.
Regards,
Glenn Adams